A Comparison of Understanding, Belief about Osteoporosis and Bone Mineral Density in Lakhok Community

Abstract

Nowadays, osteoporosis is one of the most common diseases in elderly. It considered to be a silent killer because it has no early symptoms, it can be detected only when fracture occurred. In Thailand, most of people in countryside community does not have enough knowledge about osteoporosis that led to unawareness behaviors. So, “the osteoporosis knowledge campaign” was established for increasing the knowledge to young adult and elderly people live in Lakhok Pathumthani, Thailand. The purpose of this study was to comparison the understanding, believing about osteoporosis and bone mineral density (BMD) value between before and after attended to the campaign. First, the 96 volunteers were answer the questionnaire then measured a BMD value by using quantitative ultrasound (QUS) (ALOKA AOS-100SA, Hitachi, Japan) After the measured, the volunteers were answer the same questionnaire about understanding and believing. The scores comparison was done. As expected, the results showed an average score of understanding and believing after attended the comparison was increase 81.23% and 15.92%, respectively. Therefore, we hypothesized that knowledgement, understanding and belief of osteoporosis will support the changing routine behaviors of people in community which can help to maintain the bone mineral density more than people who did not know the consequences of osteoporosis disease.